Local papers vital to democracy: Doolittle

“If you want someone watching city hall, the board of education and the police service, buy a subscription to your local paper. You’re not buying a product, you are investing in democracy.”
That’s the advice of Robyn Doolittle, the acclaimed investigative journalist who achieved worldwide recognition for her coverage of Rob Ford, Toronto’s crack-smoking former mayor.
Now on tour to promote her second book, Had it Coming, Doolittle addressed a packed house at Quince Bistro in Creemore on Tuesday night. She says that at a “moment of peril in the industry,” with newspapers across the country struggling to survive, journalism is more important than ever.
As an investigative journalist at The Globe and Mail, Doolittle says she has been given leeway to take as much time as she needs to research and develop stories that matter. This, she says, is a luxury unheard of in most news outlets.
Her new book is the stepping off point from an article titled Unfounded which was published in The Globe and Mail in February 2017. It was the culmination of a 20-month investigation into the way sexual assault complaints are handled by police, and the findings were shocking. Doolittle filed Freedom of Information requests to police services across the country, and received responses from 873 jurisdictions. After wading through thousands of police reports, she uncovered that roughly one-in-five sexual assault complaints was labelled unfounded. That means police decided, not that there was insufficient evidence to lay charges, or a reasonable chance of a conviction but, that the alleged assault had never occurred. Because these complaints were deemed unfounded, they were never reported as part of the collection of sexual assault statistics.
When Unfounded was published, The Globe and Mail made information available online allowing people to see how their local police service compared to the national average in terms of the number of complaints deemed baseless. Larger cities tended to have lower unfounded rates. In Toronto, the number was seven per cent. For South Simcoe it was 52 per cent; Southern Georgian Bay, 40 per cent; Huronia West, 42 per cent; Collingwood, 39 per cent. Specific numbers were available only for those jurisdictions that responded to the Freedom of Information request.
Overall, Doolittle found that the number of sexual assault complaints labelled unfounded was roughly double the percentage of physical assault complaints that received similar treatment.
Doolittle notes that police services generally did not care that The Globe and Mail was calling to ask questions. They started to care when local journalists called. Suddenly people were stopping them on the street, and in the library, and at the local arena asking tough questions. It was that heightened level of scrutiny that led to changes. In the wake of publication of Unfounded, many police services have instituted policy changes and improved training. Officers in roughly half of the country’s police services now receive specialized sexual assault training that includes a trauma-informed approach. Dozens of police services have adopted a program of civilian case review.
Doolittle believes there is still plenty of room for improvement. Her new book, Had it Coming, provides an excellent framework for a nuanced discussion of sexual behaviour and changing social norms.